Saturday, April 19, 2014

Beta Testing a Product - Some Thoughts

We are about to open up some of our new BuzzSumo social analytics features to a small private group of beta testers, which got me thinking about the benefits of private beta testing.

My thoughts are that private beta testing can deliver a number of benefits including:

Volunteer beta testers are a cost-effective and an efficient way to get feedback

The testing allows you to get potential customer input into the product design

Bug identification, in my experience beta testers always find bugs

It is relatively safe as you can control the size of the group and the feedback, unlike public beta testing

The testing may identify new features that users want and features they don't value

A small private beta test group can become a launch advocate group, it they like the product

Given these benefits it seems a sensible step to conduct a private beta test which will allow you to refine your product before wider public testing or going to market.

I will share some of the feedback and lessons from our testing as we progress. I suspect one of the main benefits will be simply getting a different perspective on the value of new features. For example, a couple of the new features we have been developing include detailed analysis of content shares for a particular topic. The charts below for example show the average shares by content type and content length for 'social analytics' and the most shared domains. I think these could add a lot of value when planning a content strategy for say social analytics, however, it will be interesting to see the feedback we get.